What is Marketing Automation?

“You’ve got to implement a marketing automation strategy!” How many times have you, as a business owner or marketing executive, heard that phrase? If you are like most entrepreneurs, probably quite a few times. The truth is, everyone tells you that you have to have marketing automation, yet no one tells you what it is or how to actually implement it. We’ve decided to break this trend, and provide you with some examples of how marketing automation works, and the different ways you can make it work for your business.

What is marketing automation?

According to the marketing piece, “CMO Cheat Sheet: Marketing Automation,” marketing automation is, “the use of technology to generate, nurture, score and qualify leads, and drive sales, using customized, multi-touch marketing communications tailored for each contact’s profile, level of interest, behavior or place in the buying process.”

Put simply, marketing automation is a way to automatically connect and build relationships with both current and potential clients and customers.

This sounds great, doesn’t it? But why would a business want to implement marketing automation?

However, before you can incorporate automation into your business, it is important to understand all of the moving pieces involved.

The many components of marketing automation:

Lead Generation:

Websites

Landing pages

SEO

PPC (Pay per Click)

Webinars

Social Media marketing

Direct Mail

Field Sales

Print Advertising

Banner Advertising

Infographics

Lead Management:

Auto-responders

Phone follow-ups

Content creation

Webinars

Lead scoring

Lead nurturing

Mobile marketing

Drip campaigns

That’s a lot of stuff, right? Yea, we know. However, if you have complete and integrated software to manage each of these components, you will be able to successfully implement that element we call marketing automation.